Teaching in Higher Ed

presenting

Applescript for starting and ending presentations

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apple-script

You know how it is…

It is your first day back after a vacation (or, in our case, a staycation). You're ready to rock and roll.

But, you run into all kinds of road blocks.

Today, I finally figured out the problem with my contact syncing that I've been experiencing. It first required being on the phone with an Apple tech support person for more than 45 minutes, though.

In the middle of the call, I had to ask the guy to hold on, since there was a devious looking spider that I had tried to kill earlier in the call. He was not about to be defeated.

I finally texted Dave and asked him to please come help. Dave was heroic and the Apple tech didn't seem irritated by the slight wait.

When the contacts issue was resolved, I finally got to my tasks on OmniFocus. One stood out to me as not urgent, but a potential time saver during the school year.

Apple Script for Starting and Ending Presentations / Classes

I finally allowed myself to experiment with Helmut Hauser's Apple Scripts for when you're starting and ending a presentation.

When I run it, the script quits various applications that I wouldn't want running when I'm giving a presentation. The script also launches and activates an application called Caffeine that makes sure my laptop doesn't go to sleep or run a screen saver when I'm in the middle of teaching a class.

The end-of-presentation script brings back all the applications that I want to have running when I'm not presenting (such as dropbox and OmniFocus).

It took me quite a while to set it up. This was mostly because I've never used AppleScript before today and I was in unchartered waters.

Helmut has also included on his post a link for an Alfred workflow that runs the scripts off of a keyboard shortcut. I hadn't installed Alfred on my Mac, since upgrading my hardware about a year ago. It is back on and I'm excited to familiarize myself, again, with some of the efficiencies it offers.

It is 5:05 pm… and I'm so pleased to report that when I press option-shift-9 on my computer, it takes care of everything I would normally have tried to remember to do before beginning a class.

Now, if only I could get everything else to the point of “done.” Summer is going to end all too soon.

 

Use conditioning techniques to encourage classroom involvement

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There have been times when we all feel like Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. “Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?”

Bueller

How do we get them involved? To answer that question completely would take far more time than the average attention span of a blog reader. Let me start with just one technique that will do wonders.

THE EIGHT SECOND RULE

Part of the lack of participation by our students is because we've conditioned them to believe that we don't really want them to answer our questions. We ask a question… get uncomfortable by the silence… and quickly answer it for ourselves, making it that much less likely that the students will respond to future questions.

Recognize that three things must happen before you're going to get a response to your question:

  1. The individual must hear and comprehend the question.
  2. An answer must be formulated in his or her mind.
  3. The learner must then decide if it is safe enough for them to risk failure, or giving the wrong answer.

That three-step process can take some time. I've found that if you count eight seconds to yourself (one, one-thousand, etc.), you'll never reach the eigth second before someone jumps in and responds. You can actually take advantage of a group's collective discomfort with silence and use this power to get people engaged in dialog.

I will warn you that there is one time when this technique does not always work: when you teach it to your students… I was using it once and actually got to the number eight, for the first time after decades of teaching and using this technique. It turned out that in this particular class, it related to the subject and I had told them about how to make use of the eight-second rule. They still had a hard time letting the eight seconds pass, but they sure had some big smiles on their faces when I realized I had been duped.

Let us know what other techniques you're using to get your learners engaged in the comments.